Kno ships tablets to students at last

Do you know Kno? OK, so reading that aloud might sound a little bit weird at first, but if you haven’t heard about Kno, then this is the company that has come up with a new educational tablet, hoping students will pick it up instead of lugging around heavy textbooks and giving their shoulders a nice workout. The company has just announced that they will start to ship its highly anticipated product to pre-order customers, where the first batch of Kno tablets will start to arrive on doorsteps this week – perfect if you’ve placed a pre-order for your little bird who is about to leave the nest for university pretty soon. Kno’s tablets will come in two iterations – one with a single screen just like every other tablet device out there, while another will sport a couple of displays, which is pretty much like a blown up Nintendo DS, except that this is more educational centric instead of helping you while your time away playing games.

Why the name Kno, you ask? Well, it is apparently short for knowledge, where it boasts a rather generous 14.1-inch touchscreen display which will blend textbooks, course materials, note-taking, web access, educational applications, digital media, sharing and more into a single tool that delivers a more powerful and engaging educational experience. Not only that, Kno also boasts their very own digital bookstore (www.kno.com/store/books) that will hold tens of thousands of tomes from most of the major publishers, where new books will be added to the total on a regular basis. These digital textbooks will typically cost between 30 and 50 percent cheaper comapred to physical textbooks, and Kno claims that it will pay for itself in just 3 semesters with the amount of money saved in terms of textbook costs. Of course, having a physical textbook can be pretty rewarding for those who love thumbing through physical pages, but knowing how modern our students are these days, they might just fall for the Kno instead.

As mentioned earlier, the Kno will come as a single and dual 14.1-inch screen tablet, retailing for $599 and $899, respectively. Not everyone is able to purchase the Kno outright since it is available in limited quantity, and availability is also subject to invitation only. Shipments to pre-order customers will be staggered over this month and January 2011, so you might just be one of the lucky ones to get it before Christmas.